The Malta Young Sailors Club is hosting the seventh edition of the EUROMED Malta Championships a now established event on the local sailing calendar.
This five-day Championship presents two categories of competitions – the Optimist Class challenge where the Optimist Sailing Dinghy, the internationally recognised one design single handed sailing craft, will be raced. In this Class, the largest junior class in the World the participants are ‘sailors’ under the age of 16 years.
The winners of the past six editions of this Championship were: 2000 – Lisa Tait (13yrs old) – Ireland; 2001 – Ton Thorn – (13yrs old) – Sweden; 2002 – Matthew Fleri Soler (14yrs old) – Malta; 2003 – Valentino Valacchi (14yrs old) – Italy; 2004 – Henrik Grim (14yrs old) – Sweden and 2005 – Okan Arin (12yrs old) – Turkey.
Concurrently with the Optimist Class Championship, the main attraction of the EUROMED, will also be a Lasers Class Regatta for over-16-year-old competitors, all of whom are past Optimist sailors.
This edition of the EUROMED will be staged in the picturesque Mellieha Bay over a 4 km course where the recently launched Adira Sailing Centre will be the official Championship headquarters. The programme sets off today with registration of participants while tomorrow at 1.30 pm a most regarded practise race is held which helps to put one and all in a competitive spirit. The championship presents competitors with 11 races with the first race on each day, as from Sunday starting at 10am.
This year’s fleet of participants hails from Norway, England, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and Monaco. It will be the first time that sailors from Norway and Monaco will be taking part. At the age of 8, Malta’s Karl Miggiani will be the youngest sailor in the racing fleet while the youngest foreign competitors are Ella Stoggall (Great Britain), Italian twins Stefano and GianMaria Ferrighi and Nils H. Hofmann (Germany) who are all 10-years-old.
The local sailors taking part in this year’s edition will be under the watchful eyes of Jean Paul Fleri Soler, the Malta team coach.
The technical aspect of the championship will be led by Peter Valentino as Jury Chairman and assisted by a panel of International Jury made up of Luciano Giacomi from Italy, Costas Tsantillis from Greece, both of whom have been part of the Euromed team before, Margriet Pannevis from Holland and Jean Luc Michon from France who is the past ILCA president. Mr. Michon has been brought over by the Malta Laser Class Association. Jovin Rausi will also be part of the jury as a national judge.